Well Xavier, I'm glad you still want to "get it done!" I still like playing MWO but without this league, it is a little thin. In my mind the only way to keep the game fresh is with a league, I vote NBT! I want to be a pirate again.

By July 18th, there needs to be an NBT up and running. Ideally this would be a fully-tested NBT that is ready to go on July 18th, but it's possible that we do a beta then to give PGI time to balance patch once or twice (I don't want people to buy, say, MRM boats, only to have PGI nerf the MRMs 7 days later).

This, of course, assumes that the skill tree rework doesn't drive the few remaining players away from the game forever...

Also, as of this writing, HBS looks to have pushed Battletech back to "late summer/fall 2017":

The intent was to have NBT operational when that game comes online as well, so this lines up nicely with their new timeline (get to iron out the kinks in NBT with MWO 3062, and hopefully transition into a smooth Battletech NBT league launch).

We did an alpha back at the end of 2015 as a proof of concept, in general it worked fairly well; other 3rd-party leagues such as RHoD and MRBC had worked out the logistic kinks by then, which helped.

The drops are played in private lobbies, and conditions can be set as necessary there. That, plus the fact that players can only run mechs they own on their account, are the only real differences between NBT-MWO and previous NBTs.